Another pair of C#/Python programs. This time it’s an idea branched from BugBare, my distributed bug tracker. The real problem with distributed bug trackers is their complete lack of utility and visibility for people who aren’t programmers on the project in question. BitBug dumps the distributed part and is really just a command line interface to BitBucket. All bugs are stored in BitBucket’s issues database. They obviously don’t work offline, but they’re as quick to use as BugBare and come with a ready-made web interface.

Of the two, BitBugPy is the tidier program. It uses the BitBucketAPI library for all BitBucket interaction, so the script itself is tiny. Again, it uses Python 3.2 (release candidate) so I’m sure 99% of the world won’t be able to use it. I’d look into making it a Mercurial extension, but - shock! - Mercurial is written in Python 2, not 3, and I’m not interesting in backporting it.

The C# version - BitBug - uses my MurkyCommando library as its command line UI. Since playing with the various command line argument parsers in Python I’m a lot less happy with it now.

They are both rather limited at the moment, mainly because the API offered by BitBucket is still a work in (very slow) progress.